Disaster capitalism

Who would have thought Alberta, of all places, would end up suffering from Dutch Disease?

Surely it was just weeks ago we Albertans, always ornery and lightning quick to take offence, were excoriating the likes of federal Opposition Leader Tom Mulcair and then-Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty for daring to suggest such a thing might even be possible.

Dutch Disease, as alert readers will recall, is the term coined by the snarky upper-class wits at the U.K.'s Economist magazine back in 1977 to describe what happens when rising revenues from natural resources pump a country's currency to the point its suddenly overpriced manufacturing and export sectors take a beating, with predictably depressing results for jobs and profits.

Near the end of the Toronto's Occupy last year, this question was in the air, on most peoples’ tongues.

Friends and comrades would lament that the occupation beside St. James Church had started to “go wrong.” Debates turned into fighting. Services were required for the occupants that couldn’t be given by the suite of volunteers who were there.

I spent just two hours at Occupy Vancouver and witnessed more than one fight where people had to be removed from the site.

My first instinct was to rummage through the trash, see if there was anything I would like.

I can’t help it, that’s how I react to large piles of garbage.

I’d have to remind myself several times that this wasn’t actually garbage. No one had thrown out these items. Strewn across a lawn that looked mostly dead, the broken and dirty possessions represented both the hope and despair of someone’s life after a natural disaster.

Old tea cans. A broken, rusted chandelier. The top of an arcade game. Sea shells. Single shoes, yellow and purple. A milk case full of old books that had to be trashed. A woman in distress paced back and forth along her large colonial porch, dodging volunteers as they cleaned her TV tables.

Journalist and author Naomi Klein spoke in New York last night and addressed the crisis in Haiti: “We have to be absolutely clear that this tragedy -- which is part natural, part unnatural -- must, under no circumstances, be used to, one, further indebt Haiti and, two, to push through unpopular corporatist policies in the interest of our corporations. This is not conspiracy theory. They have done it again and again.”